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Bahrain
Two vital resources exhausted: a degraded future
Social Watch Bahrain
Abdulnabi Alekry
In February 2011, as part of the so-called “Arab
Spring,” demonstrators took over the Pearl Roundabout
in the capital city of Manama; some time afterwards
Government security forces repressed them
with extreme violence. The protesters were calling
for political and social change and an end to the
monarchy, but their demands did not include a call
to tackle a problem that is a matter of life and death
in Bahrain: the need for strict controls to manage
the country’s very limited natural resources. In a
ranking of countries by the British risk analysis firm
Maplecroft in 2011, 1 Bahrain ranks as the most water-stressed
country in the world, followed by Qatar,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya. This means it is most
at risk of exhausting its water supply completely in
the short or medium term.
A looming catastrophe
The country’s biggest problem – and also the
main obstacle to sustainable development – is
the shortage of water. According to the International
Water Poverty Index , 2 a county is in a water
scarcity situation if its supply is less than 1,000
cubic metres per capita per year; in 2007 Bahrain’s
supply was only 470.3 cubic metres per person. 3
The total surface area of the kingdom is just 665
square kilometres (smaller than King Fahd airport
in neighbouring Saudi Arabia) but it has a population
of more than 1.2 million, half of whom are
foreign residents.
Almost all the fresh water consumed comes
from three non-renewable aquifers that lie under the
main island (Bahrain is made up of 32 islands). On
World Water Day in 2010, Rehan Ahmed – an environment
expert from the Public Commission for the
Protection of Marine Resources, the Environment
1 Maplecroft, Maplecroft index identifies Bahrain, Qatar,
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as world’s most water stressed
countries, (25 May 2011), .
2 Peter Lawrence, Jeremy Meigh and Caroline Sullivan, “The
water poverty index: An international comparison”, Keele
Economic Research Papers 2002/19, .
3 ChartsBin, Total Water Use per capita by Country, .
Any attempt to achieve sustainable development in this island kingdom is doomed because the country’s water
supply is running out. Although water is a non-renewable resource in Bahrain, not only is it is being consumed in
a most irresponsible way but also the limited supply is being polluted by industrial waste from the production of
oil, another resource that will soon be exhausted. These problems are aggravating inequities and social unrest,
but the Government has no adequate response and no contingency plans.
Basic Capabilities Index (BCI)
BCI = 97
100
Children reaching
5th grade
Gender Equity Index (GEI)
Empowerment
100 100
100 100
97 99
97
Births attended
Surviving under-5
Education
Economic activity
and Fauna – admitted that average water consumption
per person was around 400 litres per day, which
is far above the world average of 256 litres; Japan,
for example, consumes only 60 litres per person
per day. He noted that the water consumption rate is
rising by 8–10% per year and underground reserves
are running low. 4 In 1998 the amount of water from
the main aquifer used just for crop irrigation came to
an estimated 204 million cubic metres, but environmentalists
consider it is unsafe to extract more than
100 million cubic metres per year because Bahrain’s
average annual rainfall is less than 80 millimetres, 5
which comes nowhere near replacing what is being
consumed.
Since the 1970s one of the main strategies to
slow down the depletion of Bahrain’s aquifers has
been to build desalination plants to process seawater.
This plan went into operation in 1974 and by
2000 there were four plants that produced a total
of 73 million gallons of potable water per day. 6
When this is added to the yield from the country’s
aquifers and to what is recycled for irrigation, current
total production per day is 142 million gallons.
Daily consumption however is 140 million
gallons, which means there are no reserves of
potable water. The Government is currently im-
4 TradeArabia News Service, Bahrain Water Consumption
Soars, (23 March 2010), .
5 A. Bashir et al, Development of water resources in Bahrain,
.
6 Global Water Intelligence, “Bahrain to Scale up Desalination
Capacity”, (October 2000), .
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GEI = 54
0 0
100
plementing plans to build nine new desalination
plants and increase production to 242 million gallons
by 2030. The goal is to build water reserves
up to 420 million gallons, which would provide
three days’ supply in case of emergency. 7 There
is a suggestion that wind energy could be used to
power the new plants. 8
Over the years the Government has made other
attempts to tackle the water scarcity problem, including
campaigns for households to re-use unpolluted
waste water, but the results have either not come
up to expectations or created new problems. An
ambitious project was initiated in 1977 to recycle
water from sewage treatment plants, and for decades
the population was warned that this water was
only for watering parks and gardens and was not
suitable for human consumption. In 2006 Samir
Abdullah Khalfan, the Director of Public Health, issued
a warning that children or people in a delicate
state of health should not be taken to parks that were
irrigated in this way because there was a danger of
contracting hepatitis A. 9 This announcement led to
the temporary closure of the treatment plant, but it
7 E. Baxter, “Bahrain plans to double water production
by 2030,” Arabian Business, (30 May 2010), .
8 WaterLink International, Wind-powered Desalination for
Bahrain, (8 February 2011), .
9 S. Hamada, “Dependent on Desalinisation, Bahrain Faces
Water Conflicts,” The WIP, (2 March 2009), .
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